Poetry

Maureen N. McLane

The farmer eats shit / because he can / and likes it

Myron Stout, Untitled . No date, charcoal on Strathmore paper. 25 1/8 × 19". Photo by Justin Craun. Courtesy of Peter Freeman, Inc., New York/Paris.

Gloucester

We didn’t board the whale watch

and we missed the sunset

off the breakwater, likewise

sunrise at Land’s End.

Were we there at all. It seems

we never met

yet the calendar says we did.

Google Calendar. My life’s

in the cloud. A record

of it, partial. To record

was one thing in the 18th century,

something else now, but still the fleeting

finds its encoders, memorious.

The familiar sickness on me, let’s bury

the old forms and grids. Then let’s

graverob ourselves. Go graverobbing.

Was that the sound of old sobbing

the sobbing just now

of a gull? a bark or a laugh

or a bark of a laugh? A full haul

the trawler’s bringing in —

I am half dead but hey.

Glass half full. Half a loaf. A butt end

of a day. A way.…